A new international report by the Economist Intelligence Unit has found Australia is spending less than other developed countries on preventative health measures. The Heart Foundation says with the rate of heart disease set to increase, Australia needs to spend more on cutting smoking, improving diets and promoting exercise.

Transcript

ELEANOR HALL: An international report has found that Australia is lagging behind other countries when it comes to investing in strategies to prevent heart disease.

The National Heart Foundation says that more needs to be done here to cut smoking rates, improve diets and encourage exercise.

As Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: The National Heart Foundation says cardio vascular disease causes just under a third of all deaths in Australia and many of those were preventable.

Helen Grufferty was diagnosed with heart disease last year at the age of 46.

She's a nurse but even she didn't realise she had heart problems.

HELEN GRUFFERTY: Looking back it was like a gradual process. So initially it was like a general decrease in my fitness. I was getting a bit short of breath when walking up hills, pretty tired during the week and then I started getting these pains, so I had very atypical pains, so I had like right abdominal, upper abdominal pain and sort of right, it was all right sided and right sort of under my arm, my right shoulder blade would ache, didn't sleep well. Yeah, that sort of things.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Fortunately Helen Grufferty didn't have a heart attack. She's had two stents put in her right coronary artery and her health is being closely monitored.

A new international report by the Economist Intelligence Unit looks at the burden heart disease is putting on the world's economies.

Dr Rob Grenfell is the national director of cardiovascular health at the Heart Foundation.

ROB GRENFELL: The exposure the world has to heart disease as stated in this is $865 billion alone now and the alarming figures are talking about how this exponentially going to rise and crush most health budgets if something is not done about this over the next 20, 30 years.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Where did Australia rank in the report?

ROB GRENFELL: Australia's actually ranks very well with the survival of heart attacks in hospitals. However we rank very poorly against developed countries with regards to the expenditure which we have on preventive health.

We're 1.6 (per cent) of our health expenditure whereas the average is 3 per cent across the developed nations. Now when we talk about preventive health, we're talking about tobacco control, which we are doing a very good job, but we need to continue with an average of 16, 17 per cent of smokers still in Australia and some of high risk heart groups actually smoking up to rates of 40 to 50 per cent. We still need a lot of work on this to actually get rid of this scourge.

The other is dietary reform. We're performing very poorly on this. The amount of salt that's in our food and fat that's in our food that needs to be taken out and other countries have shown us you can do this. So the Finnish example in this report is an exemplar example of how over 30, 40 years Finland has gone from the highest risk of having a heart attack to one of the lowest in Europe and a lot of this has been on dietary reforms.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: What sort of things have they introduced to improve that?

ROB GRENFELL: Well, they worked with industry from the beginning, so the particularly, say the dairy and other sort of processed food industries, are saying okay saturated fats a problem. Let's cut it down and let's look at the healthier options and the other part of that is cut the salt down.

We've estimated that if we took out salt or administered some of the salt controls they've done in Finland here in Australia, we'd save up to 6,000 lives form heart attacks and strokes alone.